alt Hacker NewsThis seems par for the course for OpenAI/Sam Altman.
Unfortunately they are not the first company to try and externalize their costs, and they will not be the last.
Serious question, maybe a bit naive: Is there anything we can do to push back against and discourage the externalization of costs onto others?
Is this simply a matter of greed and profit-seeking outweighing one's morals (assuming one has them to begin with)?
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Change the legal definition of corporations? Corporations exist to provide liablity protections to sharholders, which means they are mainly incentivized to externalize costs and avoid liability to maximize profit, or even to make profit in businesses that would not be profitable if they could be held liable for externalized costs (deep sea oil well drilling). Limit the ability of corporations to shield themselves from view through multiple levels of shell corporations and Special Purpose vehicles. These are probably controversial stances on a board about startup culture and breaking the rules to get rich.
Stop voting for people and judges that believe in the Friedman doctrine?
Every decision has tradeoffs. Western society has largely decided to prioritze capital owners over everything else.
Even if they were to pass such a law which would be political suicide, it would still be up to the courts to say that it doesn't violate the Constitution. For example, a law that says anyone with a net worth of $1B can freely punch anyone in the face whenever they want and have immunity would be a clearly illegal law. That's basically what this bill is. The courts would then need to be made sufficiently corrupt to not strike down such a law as unconstitutional.
That depends on your definition of "we". As a society, we can regulate companies and punish the offenders (e.g. don't dump toxic waste into sources of drinking water or you'll get prosecuted). As individuals, there's not much we can do directly. How to translate individual actions into societal action is kind of the fundamental question of civilization, and if there's a uniform solution for how to achieve it, I don't think we've managed to come up with it yet.
A lot of people will dismiss this answer, but... vote for Democrats. With Bernie and upcoming young Democrats more and more are pushing back. The parties definitely are not the same. Democrats created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Republicans destroyed it.
Push your representatives to crush monopolies and manipulative practices. This happened before in the gilded age. Only a popular response can turn the tide.
Also, primaries are coming up, and not all Democrats are the same either. Plenty of the old school Democrats are facing progressive challengers. So, vote for the ones that will stand up to this garbage and follow up on whether they do. There are a lot of new faces in the Democratic party who are standing up to the BS.
The US has a lot of potential to change if we push it. A 25 point swing toward people who don't consider grift a personal priority will change a lot of things.
> Is there anything we can do to push back against and discourage the externalization of costs onto others?
On a societal scale, no. Occasionally this works in some individual cases. Like the online outrage over SOPA/PIPA 15 years ago.
But when entity X can gain $$$$$$ (or power) from doing an action, and that action costs everyone only $ (or a minor bit of inconvenience or ideological righteousness), then the average person has very little incentive to take time out of their day-to-day life to fight it.
Meanwhile the entity will do whatever it takes to get the $$$$$$/power because they have a huge incentive. This is the same mechanism that allows democracies to be eroded, as we're seeing right now in the US.